Choosing the Best CPU for Half-Life 2. Page 5

Following our detailed test report about the contemporary graphics cards performance in Half-Life 2 game we decided to pay special attention to the CPU performance in it. In our new article you will find the results obtained for 29 different platforms. Make your choice today!

d2_coast_05

Is there anything better than a nice car-ride along the steep riverside? This is exactly what we are going to do in the next demo. However, our hero will not just drive through the d2_coast_05 demo scene, but will also have to shoot a few enemies and overcome a few obstacles lying in his way.

If you have read our article devoted to the graphics cards performance in Half-Life 2, which was put up a few days ago, you should remember that this is a very processor-dependent game level. Even in the top resolution the CPU appeared a system bottleneck preventing the performance from going all the way to the maximum. But before we take a look at the top resolutions, let’s check out the systems performance in 1024x768 with disabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering.

Well, this is a pretty familiar picture, actually, with that only difference that AMD Athlon 64 processors are even farther ahead of their competitors. Well, it looks like this is typical of Half-Life 2: the more processor dependent the level is, the better perform CPUs with K8 architecture. And here the difference is simply dramatic: Athlon 64 2800+ outperforms Pentium 4 3.6GHz! Moreover, the pretty old Athlon XP CPUs seem to have caught their second wind: even Athlon XP 3200+ appears faster than any of the Pentium 4 3.2GHz.

Now let’s see how the picture will change when we set “normal” resolution.

Wow, this is a truly impressive CPU-dependence. We set the resolution to 1280x1024, enabled FSAA 4x and 16x anisotropic filtering, and the results remained almost the same. I have every right to state that the Half-Life 2 performance in this scene is fully dependent on the system CPU. This is exactly why you might want to have a faster processor for this game.